George F. Kennan: An American Life (112 page)

But in October 1980 one old friend tried. With events in Iran and Afghanistan having produced so much “confusion, bewilderment, and fuzzy thinking,” Elbridge Durbrow wrote, he could not help but recall “how realistic, sound and prophetic” Kennan had been in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. “Practically everything you predicted has transpired,” but hardly anyone in government was even aware of this. So did each new administration have to learn all over again “that the Soviet leaders since Lenin have not fundamentally changed their basic aims, goals, and methods of operation”? It was a polite way of asking, Durbrow later explained, “what the devil is the difference? I see them as still the same enemies we always had. Why does George see [them] differently?”
⁶⁰

“Mr. Carter’s performance is only a bit of history,” Kennan replied grimly on November 10, six days after Reagan’s landslide victory. Foreign policy would now be in the hands of Nitze, Scoop Jackson, and other hard-liners. There would be no limits to the arms race, or to preparations for a military showdown. Kennan had tried, since the end of the last war, to find a way of dealing with the Soviet Union that would not require a new war: “[T]oday I have to recognize the final and irreparable failure of this effort.” How all of this could please Durbrow—himself a hard-liner—Kennan could not understand, “but if it does—my congratulations. It is a small consolation to know that even if one cannot, one’s self, see hope in a situation, one has friends who can.”
⁶¹

Kennan was just back from attending the annual meeting of Pour le Mérite, an elite eighteenth-century Prussian military order revived by the West German government to celebrate civilian achievements in the arts and sciences. He had become one of its thirty foreign members in 1976, regarding the honor at least as seriously as his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The German organization combined his love of ceremony with his affinity for that culture, and despite the fact that attendance required flying across the Atlantic instead of simply slipping into New York, he rarely missed its meetings. The 1980 convocation took place in Regensburg in late September, after which the Kennans went to Garmisch, where, on October 1, George was to give the principal address at the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies.

Characteristically, he had put off finishing it until the last moment, so while waiting for it to be typed, he sat wearily on a park bench in the fading afternoon sunlight, envying other old people around him who seemed free of such weighty responsibilities. Could he ever be like them? Would anything come of it, if he tried, apart from physical and intellectual decay? Thirteen hundred people were present when he rose to address them that evening, and just as he came to the passage of which he was proudest, a woman in the audience let out a piercing shriek, as if to herald what he was about to say—which was what he wished he could say, simultaneously, to leaders in both Washington and Moscow:

The outburst, he later determined, had no connection to the lecture. But the Slavicists, expecting neither a shriek nor a prophet, responded with only polite applause. And so Kennan was left “as uncertain of the suitability (not the truth) of what I had had to say as I had been before saying it.”
⁶²

KENNAN HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE ALBERT EINSTEIN PEACE PRIZE when he got a phone call on March 9, 1981, informing him that he had won it. The prize was a new one, selection committee chairman Norman Cousins explained, established only a year earlier by the trustees of Einstein’s estate. Kennan would be the second recipient. “I was, of course, in one way pleased over this news—a pleasure not diminished, I must confess, although not mainly occasioned, by the fact that the award carries with it a $50,000 check.” He and Einstein had, after all, once been “colleagues of sorts” at the Institute for Advanced Study, even if they had never spoken. But in Kennan’s continuing struggle between scholarship and prophecy, the award might tip the balance irrevocably in the latter direction. Accepting it would imply a commitment “to do what I can to bring people to their senses and to halt a wholly unnecessary and infinitely dangerous drift towards war—and all of this at a time when I would like to finish my historical study, really retire, work around the house and garden, etc. Oh dear!”
¹

While researching his second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance in Moscow the following month, Kennan received two other unexpected accolades. Jack Matlock, the American
chargé d’affaires
, gave a dinner at which he praised his guest in more generous terms than Kennan could ever remember hearing from anyone in government. The toast made up “for all the slights and rebuffs I have had from . . . J[ohn] Foster Dulles on down.” Then at a luncheon the next day, Georgi Arbatov, the influential director of the USA and Canada Institute, offered an equally handsome tribute from the Soviet side, which also had not always passed out “posies and compliments.” Moved by these honors, Kennan came home resolved to make the most of the Einstein award: “May God give me the insight to retain, in the light of my weaknesses, my humility, and the strength to do something useful in the remaining time.”
²

The ceremony took place in Washington on May 19 before an audience including members of the new Reagan administration as well as the longtime Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennan used the occasion not to thunder dire warnings, as at Garmisch, or to descend into details, as in his recent historical writing, or to redesign America, as he had tried to do in
The Cloud of Danger
and in the
Encounter
interview
.
Nor did he contradict himself, as in his puzzling congressional testimony the previous year. Rather, he spoke softly, reasoned strategically, and put forward a single striking proposal, the logic of which swept aside conventional wisdoms almost effectively as the “long telegram” had done three and a half decades earlier.

Kennan began with the question he and Oppenheimer had often posed to each other: why, if nuclear weapons were so destructive, did there have to be so many of them? With the megatonnage of more than a million Hiroshima bombs between them, Soviet and American arsenals were “fantastically redundant to the purpose in question,” which was supposed to be deterrence. The superpowers had no excuse for holding themselves hostage to such devastation, along with the rest of the northern hemisphere. Their leaders seemed hypnotized, “like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly behind their Pied Piper.”

However well intentioned, the SALT agreements of the 1970s had worsened the situation by exaggerating the importance of intricate balances, so that even slight shifts could set off clamorous alarms. What was needed, instead, was an acknowledgment, on all sides, of lethal redundancies. This should then lead to

A 50 percent cut would be more symbolic than systematic, but it would be a start. For if the superpowers could accept that arbitrary number, then why continue haggling over the complex calculations that had stalemated SALT? Why not cut the arsenals by half again, and then by half after that, until nuclear stockpiles were approaching the point at which, as President Reagan had recently and “very wisely” said, “neither side threatens the survival of the other”? Kennan concluded his address with an exhortation from Bertrand Russell, endorsed by Einstein just before his death: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
³

“It was a radical proposal from a figure not known for radicalism,”
Washington Post
reporter Don Oberdorfer aptly observed. Certainly it was no small thing for Kennan to have enlisted Einstein, Russell, and Reagan in an attack on SALT, the centerpiece of détente. His speech was not just a
challenge to
orthodoxy: it was a
scrambling of
orthodoxies, and it produced surprising responses. Nitze, when asked the next day, acknowledged that a 50 percent reduction might make sense, provided the cuts started with the heaviest multiple-warhead ICBMs. Eugene V. Rostow, who in 1978 had dismissed Kennan as “not an earthling,” now told
The New York Times
that “[w]e are taking a careful look at [his] proposal.” Reagan had nominated Rostow to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and at his confirmation hearing a month later, he suggested replacing the acronym SALT—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—with START—Strategic Arms
Reduction
Talks: “Such proposals have been made from time to time—notably by Paul H. Nitze in 1971 and by George Kennan a few weeks ago.... No American administration could reject such a possibility out of hand.”
⁴

So how did Kennan, Nitze, and Reagan (for whom Rostow was speaking) wind up suddenly on almost the same page? The answer had to do with what the SALT process had become. Nitze had indeed proposed cuts of roughly 50 percent in ICBM launchers during the initial stages of the SALT I talks—the date was 1969, not 1971—on the assumption that the word “limitation” in the acronym meant reduction. His idea went nowhere, though, and “arms control” came to be seen as a way of stabilizing
existing
numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. By the time Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979, its provisions had become so arcane that only experts could understand them. That allowed Nitze, himself an expert but now also a vociferous critic, to claim that technocrats were squandering American assets while the Soviets were surging ahead. It ought to be possible, with a new and simpler approach, to do better.
⁵

Kennan also saw SALT as having lost its way but worried more about its dependence on “mutual assured destruction.” This was the idea, which had earned the acronym MAD, that each side’s safety lay in its capacity to annihilate the other many times over. Costs would be cataclysmic if the slightest miscalculation should ever occur, as had indeed happened, Kennan knew well, with the outbreak of World War I. Unlike Nitze, he supported SALT II, not on its merits but out of fear for the effect on Soviet-American relations if it should be rejected. After Carter withdrew the treaty from the Senate, however, Kennan too was ready for something new: hence his Einstein Prize proposal.
⁶

Reagan, it turned out, agreed with
both
Nitze and Kennan. He wanted a more straightforward approach to arms control that would complement his efforts to regain American strategic superiority: that put him in Nitze’s camp. But his abhorrence of nuclear weapons went back at least as far as Kennan’s. Throughout Reagan’s slow shift from Hollywood liberalism to Goldwater conservatism, he had always believed that nuclear weapons should be abolished. They could be the means, he worried quite literally, by which the biblical prophecy of Armageddon might be fulfilled. Making no secret of his aversion to MAD, Reagan asked repeatedly during the 1980 campaign why there could not be “an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.” He opposed SALT II because it failed to provide that.
⁷

Whether by accident or design, the State Department chose the day of Kennan’s address to announce that the United States would no longer be bound by either SALT agreement, thereby ending twelve years of Soviet-American negotiations on “arms limitation.” In the fall of 1981, however, Reagan proposed a new round of talks on a different problem: the upgraded intermediate-range ballistic missiles the U.S.S.R. had deployed against Western European targets during the late 1970s, against which NATO now planned a counterdeployment. Kennan saw an opportunity to “denuclearize” Europe, by exchanging a Soviet removal of IRBMs for an American withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from West Germany. Reagan did not go that far, but he came close. He put Nitze in charge of the negotiations, and then accepted a proposal from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Richard Perle to offer a “zero option”—not a 50 percent cut but a verifiable ban on
any
IRBMs aimed at European targets by either side.
⁸

Reagan announced the plan in his first major “arms reduction” speech—his preferred term—on November 18, 1981. He called also for cutting conventional forces in Europe, while resuming talks on strategic weapons under the acronym START, the one Rostow had suggested, which Kennan and Nitze had inspired. Reagan did so a day after Kennan, speaking at Dartmouth, had condemned the “systematic dehumanization” of the Soviet leadership in administration rhetoric, but the president was ready for that criticism too. He revealed that while recovering from an assassination attempt the previous spring, he had sent a handwritten letter to Brezhnev emphasizing the aspirations Americans and Russians held in common: “They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves.” The juxtapositions were striking enough for
The New York Times
to suggest editorially that some kind of Reagan-Kennan dialogue must be under way.
⁹